Dissonance
by Eyesdown104
Summary: Carrie one-shot. Set probably after season one, before season two, or really any time around there where Carrie is struggling for stability in her condition.


Carrie sat in her gloomy apartment staring at the huge, now barren, cork board that covered the far wall. It was dusk but she hadn't opened her curtains or switched on a lamp, convinced that she still had light enough to see by.

She had escaped. Finally lost her patience and walked away from the healing or nurturing haven, or whatever-the-hell it was meant to be, that Maggie had gone to such pains to provide. She must be feeling better, Carrie decided, because all it had been to her for the past few days was suffocating.

Her apartment was much quieter than Maggie's place. Neat and decorated in placid greens, calming blue-greys, ordered and steady with her posters in frames. Still. No nieces giggling and crashing through the house, no Frank singing at the top of his voice or yelling at the baseball. Nevertheless, Carrie could hear everything. The very sounds of stillness. She listened to the whir of the air con, the hum of the refrigerator, the buzz of the digital display on the DVD player. She convinced herself that she could even hear the sounds that weren't there yet. The raw green squeak of the emerging shoots on her pot plant. Water waiting to trickle in the cistern upstairs. The more she listened in, the more deafening the solitary sounds of being home became, especially when she could feel so much life and energy coursing through her.

She could feel it rising in her. She felt so much better than the long-lasting flatline she had experienced lately that she wasn't sure if this was a little hit of mania or just a return to normalcy. She was taking her meds and attuned to her condition but she asked herself if she had ever really known what normalcy was.

Very early on, one of her college tutors remarked to Carrie that she clearly marched to the beat of her own drum, which was startlingly refreshing in one so young, even within the hotbed of intellectual confidence that was Princeton. She took this as a huge compliment at the time and became proud of her 'difference'. This was before her diagnosis, before her misguided submission of an extracurricular thesis redefining the concept and history of music, before her first crashing nosedive into the abyss and before her _proud difference_ became a badge of shame. It had cost her friends and her college boyfriend, almost her academic career. Looking back, she had been in no way more into the boyfriend than he was into her, but the rejection her diagnosis prompted him to perform hit her hard at the time. Invitations to beach parties and a Route 66 road trip at Spring Break were hard to pass up in favour of visiting your girlfriend in an asylum when you were twenty two, she guessed. Her mother had done the same thing, ditching her dad once she thought that both kids had safely flown the nest. When Carrie was well enough to absorb the news that she had inherited her father's curse, she wondered if it was just her dad that her mother had fled from. She wondered whether her mother hadn't seen it coming, recognised it in Carrie and decided to get out rather than undergo the pain and impotence of watching it fracture her daughter, thwarting the hopes and dreams she had harboured for her youngest. Carrie had always been a boisterous, impulsive and insouciant child. Perhaps all the signs were always there and her mom had just been waiting with growing unease for it to finally hatch.

But as time wore on she came to accept it, live with it and even rely on operating within the extra bandwidth her condition allowed her. Despite being hospitalised for a spell, she managed to graduate within the normal time frame for her college cohort and even outperformed most of her peers. She was back at college for her finals and to attend the CIA recruitment seminar where she first clapped eyes on Saul Berenson, warm, worldly and party to infinite wisdom that Carrie could only dream of. Listening to him speak, fantasies of Uganda suddenly didn't seem so improbable. Her family had serious reservations. Her dad was paranoid about state control of the individual and shadowy international organisations at the best of times and Maggie, her sister-slash-mother-slash-physician, knew that it was wildly unsuitable given the medical facts. But Carrie had ploughed on regardless and her family had backed her up in the end. Maggie even risked everything by enabling her with off-the-book anti-psychotics.

Carrie rejected out of hand any accusation of arrogance regarding her abilities that was ever leveled at her. She was not overstating things - when she was good she really was adamant that she was _that_ good. Woe betide anyone who tried to get in her way. Just like Icarus had no idea he had gone too far until he smelled the wax and they scooped him up miles later in a bloody tangle of limbs and feathers, Carrie never recognised when she was nearing the point of no return. And she pushed it every time. 9/11 had devastated her much like everyone else, but it had shaken her to the core in a very personal sense also. She was not superhuman. She was just as fallible (and secretly even more so) as everyone else at the CIA who had been blindsided. Even though she recognised that it was a collective failure, she felt personally culpable and would wear the stain on her soul forever. Since then, things had been slowly slipping, no incidents for a while and then she would become rash, drop the ball and calamity would ensue.

In her more reflective, lucid moments, Carrie acknowledged that it wasn't just herself that her illness had claimed. She thought about her translator, strung up by a mob for protecting her when she had defiantly wandered into territory she had no official business in visiting. She thought about Hasan in his Iraqi cell, moments to live because she had pushed him so hard, giving her that vital piece of information with one of his final breaths, the trigger for her current holy mess. Lynne Reid, who she failed to protect. She thought about David, who she had pursued with such heat and vigour while she was on an upswing and who she had dropped in horror at his tattered family life as soon as she had levelled out again. She thought about Brody, whose broken existence she had only served to exacerbate with her personal fixation with him and her dogged insistence that he had been turned. Finally, she thought of Saul, who had put his ass on the line for her every time. She always knew there would come a time when that had to end.

The lonely sounds of her apartment were beginning to drown out her own thoughts. She could hear the shadows stretching longer across the wall as the sun fell and the static electricity bristling nervously in the carpet pile. She wandered over to the stereo and started up the CD player to put paid to it. Music would often save her. Jazz in particular. It was an acquired taste, but those who understood _really_ understood. Saul got it, unsurprisingly; perhaps that was why they shared such affinity. Maggie said it gave her a headache, the lack of a _normal_ tune and all the discordant notes made her run from the room. Jazz wasn't something passive, it was living, breathing, and untameable. As much in the performance, improvised in the moment, as it was possible to be. The recordings on her CD and vinyl collections were nothing but snapshots, preservations of moments of sheer brilliance, but they managed to sound fresh and different every time she listened. It was immensely appealing to someone as erratic yet inventive as Carrie. As in her professional life, she derived such pleasure from spotting patterns that others could not see or hear, hearing notes that were coming next but were perhaps never played, picking out a rhythm imperceptible to others. That had to be why she and Saul were always on the same wavelength, it had to be. She would tell him this theory when she next saw him, whenever that might be. Carrie loved the thrum of a double bass string. Sometimes, if she turned her stereo up loud enough, she could feel it resonating in the sole of her foot. If she was listening to music live in a bar, it passed through her skin and tickled her heart.

The trumpet raised its golden head above the other instruments before diving back down to mingle and gyrate with the rest of the band. Carrie had the sudden urge to go out and seek the music, the people and the lights. She would make a new friend tonight, the way she always did. Not a forever-friend, granted, but some guy to drink with and take her overwhelming vivacity out on. It was simple, easy, sometimes a show of strength. She craved the success and invincibility she felt through manipulating someone to do exactly what she wanted them to, them behaving exactly how she predicted when they were presented with the brazen version of herself that she would project in a bar or a club. An end to physical loneliness, the friction of another's body on hers. No need to explain, to be anyone or to reveal anything ugly that would scare them away or make them reject her. She was never with her mark long enough to screw anything up, even Carrie could keep up the pretence of normalcy for a couple of hours. Men seemed to like her. Her shameless sexuality and lack of inhibition made them think it was their birthday; here was a woman who said she was ready for anything, anywhere and right now. The stuff of online no-strings adventures made flesh.

Carrie got changed in a hurry, eager to get out there now that the idea had occurred to her. She downed some wine as a sharpener while she hastily applied her makeup and fished out her engagement ring. Alcohol was good for a start but she was truly thirsty for the adrenalin of the chase and sometimes of the act too, if it was with a dubious character or in a public place. She itched to feel this chemical overpowering the others at play in her brain chemistry, just for a while. The riskier the encounter the better, most times; vanilla hotel rooms with married men rarely hit the spot these days. When her climax flushed through her system, it would blow everything else away. Like drops of ink feathering into water, eventually her bloodstream would be flooded, turned an entirely different colour. She would briefly experience an alternate state to that coshed and dominated by clozapine and lithium. Just for a short while. Carrie recalled that it mostly always worked, she had only ever been turned down twice. Once a guy had a last-minute pang of guilt about his wife and kids (not her problem), and another time when she had been far too wired even for a one-night-stand and the guy decided that she had to be on something hardcore and got spooked. It didn't matter, it wasn't personal. The whole point was that it wasn't personal.

A short while later, her heels clacked into the night and she was off to chase the tails of jazz and solace. Her grip on both would be fleeting, but it would be enough to confirm that it was out there.


End file.
